The Foresters

Alfred Tennyson wrote his verse play about the famous English outlaw, and his last book in his lifetime, The Foresters: Robin Hood and Maid Marian, at the request of the America theatre manager Augustin Daly in 1892, when he was 82 years old. Daly, who had met Arthur Sullivan in California, asked him to write the music and Sullivan composed the nine short numbers which comprise the score. Sullivan probably undertook the work out of regard for Tennyson rather than any real enthusiasm for the play itself and tried to persuade Tennyson to make changes. He objected strongly to the title of the play, finding it colourless, and urged Tennyson to change it to Maid Marian, but the elderly poet refused.